There Will Be More – review

British theatre has its outcasts, sons it once clutched to its bosom but who are now exiled: Howard Barker is one, Edward Bond another. The latter's shadow looms long over British theatre. But while many will cite the stoning of a baby in the 1965 play Saved (in its time as controversial as Sarah Kane's Blasted) as one of the most striking images of postwar British theatre, Bond's great plays from the 60s and 70s offer not just savagery, but also a hint that we might yet save ourselves. The sight of a man picking up a chair at the end of Saved and quietly starting to mend it, is quite possibly one of the most absurdly optimistic gestures that you will ever see anywhere.

There's no such optimism in Bond's latest play, which draws upon Greek tragedy and the story of Medea. In the first 20-minute scene, a woman preparing to attend a military dinner with her ambitious army-colonel husband, suddenly removes her dress, smothers her twin baby sons and dashes out their brains with her heels. An act of madness? Or a warped act of love, saving them from becoming men who kill and will be killed in an endless cycle of war? Her husband's response is to rape her, resulting in the birth of twin boys. Eighteen years later, after the asylum where she has been detained is bombed, she returns to the family home.

There is some hard, unflinching writing here, but uncertain performances and an awkward, often unintentionally comic production make this seem perilously close to a parody of an Edward Bond play. After almost two hours, when this latter-day Medea promises, "There will be more", it's hard to resist the instinct to run from the theatre shouting‚ "No, I've had quite enough."